Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Yesterday the European Parliament accepted the report of its special committee on rendition. If our Government is capable of being embarrassed, it should be embarrassed because, as the Leader well knows, we spent a year or two trying to get the most rudimentary information out of the Department of Transport about aircraft landing in Shannon Airport. This is long before anybody had accepted that rendition existed. We simply wanted to know what the Department knew but it would not tell us. The Minister for Transport came to the House and he obfuscated. All sides of the House wrote and asked for information. The country now has the profound embarrassment of being labelled a collaborator in fundamental abuses of human rights.